After a kid was arrested recently for bringing a homemade clock to school, one has to wonder if School administration have screw loose or two.

Article:
News Story

How much would you be willing to pay for these prints and how much do you think they would cost?

Also wondering how much you think it costs?



Made by a friend.

Selling price for prints:

Taking orders for prints of my ‪#‎artwork‬ done with pencil. Pricing - 24"x18" - $80ea, the ‪#‎samurai‬ set for $220. Or 18"x12" - $65 ea, the samurai set for $180. I've got 60+hours of work into each of these pieces. Act fast, I'm only going to do this one time - taking orders till Saturday. Let me know. Thanks.

So what is?

Be it Skype, Plug.dj or any other chatting software or system.

Strategic Development and Irregular Warfare: Lessons from the High Water Mark of Full-Spectrum COIN

Here is an article I found and just thought of having a discussion on with some guys on it.

trategic Development and Irregular Warfare: Lessons from the High Water Mark of Full-Spectrum COIN

Jeff Goodson

The high water mark of full-spectrum counterinsurgency (COIN) occurred in Afghanistan from 2010-2012.  Military and civilian budgets were at their peaks, including Economic Support Funds (ESF), Commanders Emergency Response Funds (CERP), the Afghan Infrastructure Fund (AIF), and funding for the DoD Task Force for Business and Stability Operations (TFBSO).   The Afghan surge was in place, the military footprint was at its maximum, and the drawdown of personnel and resources that followed President Obama’s 2009 announcement of U.S. withdrawal  had not yet begun.

The new military COIN doctrine articulated in December 2006 had been applied to the surge in Iraq with some success, and it was being applied in Afghanistan under General Stanley McChrystal as Commander of the International Security Assistance Force (COMISAF).  Both governance and socioeconomic development were integral elements of the COIN doctrine, as well as the ”3D” national security policy framework of Defense, Development, Diplomacy.     

General David Petraeus took command of ISAF in June 2010.  At his direction, German Major General Richard Rossmanith was brought in as DCOS Stability and instructed to ‘staff up development, pursue it aggressively, and get it into the game.’  Over the next seventeen months, STAB/Development formulated, articulated and executed the socioeconomic development part of the military campaign strategy.  That work constituted a benchmark for operationalizing development intelligence in COIN, and established a way forward for similar future work in irregular warfare campaigns.

The Mandate:  STAB/Development had three specific mandates:

Integrate socioeconomic development into the military Campaign Plan;
Analyze, facilitate and troubleshoot strategic development projects; and
Provide the best counsel to COMISAF on strategic development issues.
The unit was a new kind of military organization, responsible for an admixture of strategic, intelligence, analytical, troubleshooting and advisory tasks.  In execution, it evolved into what variously served as a development intelligence unit, an issues management cell, a think tank, deal brokers, problem troubleshooters, counselor to the Commander, advisor to subordinate commands, and clearinghouse for information on strategic development.  But it operated without development funds.  Instead, it pushed the diaspora of development organizations to execute projects with the greatest COIN impact, regardless of funding source.   

The Staff:  STAB/Development had about 75 staff, all but a few of them military.  Most were U.S., but there were also representatives from nearly two dozen contributing countries over the duration of the operation.  The development experience of the military staff was mixed, but it was supplemented with a handful of seasoned development professionals seconded over from other organizations.  It also included the occasional world-class expert—for example in rail—“borrowed” from other military units.

Most importantly, the ability of the unit to operate successfully at the strategic level was enabled by fifteen or so Afghan Hands who were assigned to it.  The Hands, a small cadre of U.S. military and civilians armed with Afghan language, culture and COIN training, were mostly attached to the Ministers or senior staff of key Afghan development ministries.  Both individually and collectively, they became game-changers in the extreme.     

The Campaign Plan:  STAB/Development started formulating the development part of the Campaign Plan by articulating the role and importance of development in the 2010 Operational Plan (OPLAN).  After a strategic approach was approved by Petraeus in January 2011, the unit began evolving a COIN Development Strategy for 2012-2014.  That strategy established the foundation of the development part of OPLAN 38302, approved by COMISAF in November 2011 and by JFC-Brunssom after approval by DCOS/Stability in January 2012.     

Operationally, the unit was made responsible for Line of Operation (LOO) #6 of the campaign—“enable socioeconomic development”.  This recognized the role that poor social and economic conditions were playing in fueling instability in Afghanistan, and the role that delivery of basic social and economic services could play in legitimizing the government.  The unit was also charged with two campaign strategic priorities, “enabling development of strategic infrastructure” and “enhancing border area management.”

The Developers:  Socioeconomic development is planned, funded and executed by a wildly diverse array of international development agencies.  In Afghanistan STAB/Development recorded well over 150 active development organizations, including multilateral development banks, bilateral donors, United Nations organizations, non-governmental organizations, military units, private organizations, and others.  About twenty of these were key players which—knowingly or unknowingly—were executing projects important to the COIN campaign.

The Military as Development Agent:  The US military was arguably the most important of these development agents.  This was partly because of its focus on development as an element of COIN, and because of the many strengths, resources and specialized programs that it brought to enable COIN development in theater.  Among the most important of these were its ability to shape, clear and hold terrain, its ability to enable other development agents to work in insecure areas, its presence throughout the war zone, and the ready access it provided to governors and ministers.  The military also brought logistics, organization, superb personnel, intelligence resources, Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs), CERP funding for local projects, AIF funding for larger projects, Special Forces tip-of-the-spear capabilities, Village Stability Operations, the Afghan Hands, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and Civil Affairs units.

Triaging Development:  One strategic priority of the Campaign Plan approved by Petraeus in 2010 was to enable development of “strategic infrastructure”.  He used the term “strategic” in conjunction with other development actions on multiple occasions, referring to ‘tactical effects with strategic implications’ in the context of Village Stability Operations in 2011, for example, and to ‘strategic CERP projects that emanated from the strategic level’ at ISAF HQ.  In 15 March 2011 testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, he elaborated on the strategic implications of AIF projects: 

“These are larger projects that…are central to the conduct of a counterinsurgency campaign.  So these are not economic development and they’re not economic assistance or something.  These are projects that directly enable the success of our troopers on the ground…(T)he first tranche of these, for example, is almost all energy related, infrastructure related…to enable the revival of the areas in Kandahar and the greater south, and then tying in a power grid to that as well.”

In execution, STAB/Development distinguished socioeconomic development from other activities like governance and humanitarian assistance that are often lumped into the “development” rubric.  It then triaged the many hundreds of ongoing Afghan development projects into three categories:  development, defined as all socioeconomic projects; COIN development, defined as those socioeconomic projects contributing materially to COIN objectives; and strategic development, defined as those COIN development projects that were—alone or in aggregate—critical to attaining COMISAF’s strategic objectives.

Focusing the Work:  In the COIN development strategy, STAB/Development articulated an end state for Afghanistan that focused on ensuring that social and economic conditions wouldn’t derail the security transition after the announced end of the military campaign in 2014. The strategy had three elements: social infrastructure, economic infrastructure, and economic growth.  In social infrastructure it focused primarily on access to basic health and education services, differentiating between physical infrastructure—the schools and clinics—and the operational infrastructure like the staff and recurring costs required to make them function.  In economic infrastructure it focused on roads, rail, aviation, power, water, telecommunications, and borders.  The unit tracked well over 200 COIN-critical infrastructure projects, and as in the social sectors it worked on both the operational and the physical plant.

The most complicated part of the strategy was economic growth because it is the hardest to operationalize.  To simplify the problem, it was broken into economic governance (the legal, regulatory, judicial, and policy frameworks) and business support (business infrastructure, skills development, banking and finance, large investors, and small and medium enterprises).  The work of Paul Brinkley and the TFBSO in Iraq was hugely consequential, and STAB/Development  collaborated with them in Afghanistan extensively in the energy and mining sectors.

The Perfect Storm and Basic Services:  There was an economic perfect storm brewing in Afghanistan at that time, making prospects for achieving sustainable economic growth poor over the mid-term.  We recognized that the quickest way for social and economic conditions to derail the security transition after 2014 was if the modest but long-running streamflow of benefits that the Afghan government delivers to the grass roots level were to dry up.  We therefore began to also focus on the sustainability of eight basic services programs—delivering health, education, rural roads, local power systems, agriculture, water/sanitation, employment and rural development.  Each was addressed by proven, long-running programs that were funded by international donors, and executed by a few key ministries.   

Results:  In the seventeen months from September 2010-February 2012, STAB/Development tracked hundreds of development projects and analyzed, troubleshot or collaborated on well over a hundred major COIN- and strategic-level projects and issues.  These included: 

Roads: Ring Road Northwest, the Salang Tunnel, Armalek-Lahman, Upper Route 611, the E-W and N-S corridors, Kabul-Jalalabad, Kandahar bypass, and Route Lithium;
Rail:  Hairatan-Mazar (Afghanistan’s first rail line), creation of a National Rail Authority, Northern Distribution site assessment, rail gauge analysis, and the rail-mining nexus;
Aviation: The Civil Aviation Law and Civil Aviation authority, the national Area Control Center, ICAO standards at the national airports, and Kandahar airport funding;
Power:  Kajaki hydropower, Kandahar power, the NEPS-SEPS connection, Sheberghan gas, Naglu-Jalalabad and Jalalabad-Asadabad transmission, and the TAPI pipeline;
Water: The Kajaki, Salma, Dahla, Kamal Khan, Darunta and Kunar dams, the Jowzjan pipeline, and water sector operations and maintenance;
Telecommunications: Current State Assessment, National Optical Fiber Ring, 24/7 cellular, the National Data Center, and communications links to the ministries;
Borders:  Interdiction operations, synchronization, customs performance, key Border Control Point monitoring, and border problems with Pakistan;
Health: Supported CJ-MED, which had the lead for HQ ISAF support in the critical health sector part of socioeconomic development, and developed sector strategy metrics;   
Education:  Radio/television and higher education, ICT education, VTC training, religious engagement, community colleges, and the Communications Technology Institute;   
Mining:  Mining tenders, the Afghan-Tajik Basin, Aynak copper, Bamyan coal, Hajigak iron, Zara Zaghan gold, Angot and Amu Darya oil fields, and the TAPI pipeline;
Agriculture:  Poppy cultivation alternatives, wheat distribution, saffron, emergency drought, seed distribution, agribusiness strategy, and agribusiness value chains;
Basic Services:  Identified eight COIN-critical basic services, tracked program coverage for those services, and troubleshot coverage shortfalls;
Transition:  Basic services, National and local governance connection in service provision, provincial Transition Implementation Plans, and transition metrics;
Cross-Cutting:  Donor financial streamflow analysis, COIN spending, the New Silk Road, private security contractors, budget execution, and operations & maintenance.
Altogether, STAB/Development produced over 100 major written analytical or briefing products, about 75 of them directly for COMISAF.  The consumers of these products, in addition to the Commanders, included intelligence agencies, subordinate commands, PRTs, incoming military units, visiting VIPs, governors, ministers, diplomats, key development agencies, and international conferences.   

Why It Worked:  At this place and time, having a robust military capability to strategize, track, analyze and troubleshoot strategic development worked.  There were a number of reasons for this.  First, it was a military operation.  STAB/Development could never have succeeded at this work in either a U.S. diplomatic or, especially, U.S. development agency structure.  Second, the unit was located physically and organizationally close to the ISAF Commanders, and had direct communications with them.  Third, at the top there was a clear understanding of the importance of development to COIN, and commitment to operationalizing it as a central element of the Afghan COIN campaign.  Fourth, the mandate was right and the work was made an integral part of the military campaign and operational plans.  Fifth, it was resourced right: It had the right level of staff and assets for that specific campaign.  Sixth, the DCOS Chief of Staff succeeded in recruiting not just high quality staff, but also a large number of Afghan Hands who greatly increased our ability to successfully conclude COIN-critical issues.  And last, the unit was led by a seasoned development expert who was seconded over to the military and was in the military chain of command.       

Transition and Debate:  As force drawdown and budget cuts started to affect operations at NATO headquarters and STAB/Development in late 2011, the U.S. created a parallel unit in the ISAF Joint Command (IJC) that could sustain and further operationalize the strategic development work.  That unit took over the lead for strategic development in 2012.   

Troop drawdown marked the end of full-spectrum COIN in Afghanistan in 2012, and it may be the last time for the foreseeable future that COIN is applied in this way anywhere.  The drawdown began a robust debate on the performance of COIN, and its potential applicability to future irregular warfare.  Much of the results of that debate are embodied in the new COIN manual (FM 3-24) and Stability manual (FM 3-07), which were revised and re-issued in 2014.  At the end of the campaign, though—analogous to what happened with the CORDS program in Vietnam—the short three-year application of full-spectrum COIN in Afghanistan ended before it could prove itself conclusively one way or the other.

Strategic Development and Irregular Warfare:  Irregular warfare is defined as “a violent struggle among state and non-state actors for legitimacy and influence over the relevant populations.” Of the five kinds of warfare included under that typology—counter-terrorism, unconventional warfare, foreign internal defense, COIN, and stability operations—the work of strategic development is primarily integral only to COIN and stability ops.   

Military priorities are in a state of rapid change, and the primary strategic focus in 2015 is on counter-terrorism and hybrid warfare.  DoD policy, however, is to also remain proficient in the execution of irregular warfare, including both COIN and stability operations.  That development is important to successfully fighting insurgencies is clear, and not just in COIN and stability doctrine.  In 2013, for example, analyzing the relationship between successful COIN and 24 COIN “concepts”, the RAND Corporation found a “strong” linkage between the concept of development and COIN success and noted that “…the COIN force won every time it implemented…” the development concept.

The Future:  It is also clear that insurgencies and stability operations are here to stay.  The 2013 RAND analysis examined 71 insurgencies that started and ended since 1945, and the Council on Foreign Relations has enumerated an additional 74 post-WW II insurgencies that were still ongoing as of 2012.  That’s 145 new insurgencies in 67 years, or a rate of about two new insurgencies a year. 

There are, however, three inherent limitations that will always work against COIN:  time, money, and political will.  What is needed going forward is a refined “COIN light” approach that can better target specific elements on the critical path to defeating insurgencies that are of lesser scope and magnitude than the one in Afghanistan.  For insurgencies that are truly religious in nature, those elements may not include socioeconomic factors at all.  For most other insurgencies, however—and for virtually all stability operations—socioeconomics will likely play a significant role.  And for those, fortunately, the strategic development work carried out at the high water mark of COIN is scalable.

Source: Small Wars Journal

OnePlus 2

Why is it so hard to get an invite?

Seriously, the method of trying to get the phone is so hard, I feel like I might as well choose something else at times. Plus how beneficial do you think this method of advertising is for the phone?

Is it me or has there been an increase in members on this site. Cause i feel like a number of users on here are new or people I have not met before. Mind you I did take a break for a time.

Or is it just old users with new names?

And everything was great.



Just a new movie. Still though with how Seth and the crew has been doing. Any possibilities that this might be a good watch?

Also written by the writer of 50/50.

So umm, with the Deadpool movie, will they introduce Death?

I mean Thanos is fascinated in her but she is more interested with Deadpool.

DeadpoolXDeath
Best Couple

Spoilers

So i am kind of interested in learning about economics and well was wondering if there were any books or resources that are good to use if one wants to learn about economics.

Also if wondering why i am asking, well i have a strong interest in geopolotics. As economics is integral to that topic i am i terested in it. I am also shamefully interested in stock trading so yeah i just need to understand the couple of things that are involved in econ and finance.

Still any good resources?

How do you think civil rights movements would have changed?

Where would you see him and how important would he be in the political theater?

I was just wondering as he became a really polarizing person who due to his belief became a target of the very organization he once suppprted.

The more aware you are that you do not know.

This is something i have been thinking about for sometime. As i pointed out it just seems that the more you learn or are knowledgable in one topic the more you start to notice how much you do not know.

Thia is mainly due to more questions being composed as you answer each question.

So what i am saying may be full of bullshit, so i was wondering do you ever notice how you are more awarenof what you do not know, the more educated you are in a topic?

I know this is a stupid place to discuss this but here is an old article that i feel should be discussed.
Obama is a Republican

The point the author makes is that throughout the whole presidency, Obama has actually been closer to the policies that the Republicans follow in comparison to that of the Republican party. His fiscal policies have introduced cuts although spending did go up, cuts were made quite heavily both due to Republican negotiations and personal reorganization. He has also moved against the projection of power into conflicts and has played a fine line between interventionism and isolationism. Focusing more of his foreign affairs on the economic and the diplomatic platform in contrast to a militaristic one.

And most ironic of all, is that Obama's own Health Reform is based of old Republican Health Plans and ironically, previous presidency candidate Mitt Romney's own Health Care Package that he proposed and applied to his state. Although he has been supportive of progressive social stances, he has been slow or quite hands off when it comes to those topics. These include Gay Marriage, drugs, taxes and Race. It seems that no matter how we look at it, Obama has been quite silent when it comes to social issues, instead staying out of it, and giving remarks every now and again.

Overall if one looks at his presidency, it seems to outline a Republican presidency in the shroud of Democrats. Why so, not sure. It could be personal policy choice of Obama to Republican control of the house that pushed these type of motions. If anything this does show that minority governments do have to rely on diplomacy to get things through.

I wonder if the Republicans were in the same position would they have been more progressive instead of conservative.

The article in it's full:

Back in 2008, Boston University professor Andrew Bacevich wrote an article for this magazine making a conservative case for Barack Obama. While much of it was based on disgust with the warmongering and budgetary profligacy of the Republican Party under George W. Bush, which he expected to continue under 2008 Republican nominee Sen. John McCain, Bacevich thought Obama at least represented hope for ending the Iraq War and shrinking the national-security state.

I wrote a piece for the New Republic soon afterward about the Obamacon phenomenon—prominent conservatives and Republicans who were openly supporting Obama. Many saw in him a classic conservative temperament: someone who avoided lofty rhetoric, an ambitious agenda, and a Utopian vision that would conflict with human nature, real-world barriers to radical reform, and the American system of government.

Among the Obamacons were Ken Duberstein, Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff; Charles Fried, Reagan’s solicitor general; Ken Adelman, director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency for Reagan; Jeffrey Hart, longtime senior editor of National Review; Colin Powell, Reagan’s national security adviser and secretary of state for George W. Bush; and Scott McClellan, Bush’s press secretary. There were many others as well.

According to exit polls in 2008, Obama ended up with 20 percent of the conservative vote. Even in 2012, after four years of relentless conservative attacks, he still got 17 percent of the conservative vote, with 11 percent of Tea Party supporters saying they cast their ballots for Obama.

They were not wrong. In my opinion, Obama has governed as a moderate conservative—essentially as what used to be called a liberal Republican before all such people disappeared from the GOP. He has been conservative to exactly the same degree that Richard Nixon basically governed as a moderate liberal, something no conservative would deny today. (Ultra-leftist Noam Chomsky recently called Nixon “the last liberal president.”)

Here’s the proof:

Iraq/Afghanistan/ISIS

One of Obama’s first decisions after the election was to keep national-security policy essentially on automatic pilot from the Bush administration. He signaled this by announcing on November 25, 2008, that he planned to keep Robert M. Gates on as secretary of defense. Arguably, Gates had more to do with determining Republican policy on foreign and defense policy between the two Bush presidents than any other individual, serving successively as deputy national security adviser in the White House, director of Central Intelligence, and secretary of defense.

Another early indication of Obama’s hawkishness was naming his rival for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state. During the campaign, Clinton ran well to his right on foreign policy, so much so that she earned the grudging endorsement of prominent neoconservatives such as Bill Kristol and David Brooks.

Obama, Kristol told the Washington Post in August 2007, “is becoming the antiwar candidate, and Hillary Clinton is becoming the responsible Democrat who could become commander in chief in a post-9/11 world.” Writing in the New York Times on February 5, 2008, Brooks praised Clinton for hanging tough on Iraq “through the dark days of 2005.”

Right-wing columnist Ann Coulter found Clinton more acceptable on national-security policy than even the eventual Republican nominee, Senator McCain. Clinton, Coulter told Fox’s Sean Hannity on January 31, 2008, was “more conservative than he [McCain] is. I think she would be stronger in the war on terrorism.” Coulter even said she would campaign for Clinton over McCain in a general election match up.

After Obama named Clinton secretary of state, there was “a deep sigh” of relief among Republicans throughout Washington, according to reporting by The Daily Beast’s John Batchelor. He noted that not a single Republican voiced any public criticism of her appointment.

By 2011, Republicans were so enamored with Clinton’s support for their policies that Dick Cheney even suggested publicly that she run against Obama in 2012. The irony is that as secretary of state, Clinton was generally well to Obama’s left, according to Vali Nasr’s book The Dispensable Nation. This may simply reflect her assumption of state’s historical role as the dovish voice in every administration. Or it could mean that Obama is far more hawkish than conservatives have given him credit for.

Although Obama followed through on George W. Bush’s commitment to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq in 2011, in 2014 he announced a new campaign against ISIS, an Islamic militant group based in Syria and Iraq.

Stimulus/Deficit

With the economy collapsing, the first major issue confronting Obama in 2009 was some sort of economic stimulus. Christina Romer, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, whose academic work at the University of California, Berkeley, frequently focused on the Great Depression, estimated that the stimulus needed to be in the range of $1.8 trillion, according to Noam Scheiber’s book The Escape Artists.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was enacted in February 2009 with a gross cost of $816 billion. Although this legislation was passed without a single Republican vote, it is foolish to assume that the election of McCain would have resulted in savings of $816 billion. There is no doubt that he would have put forward a stimulus plan of roughly the same order of magnitude, but tilted more toward Republican priorities.

A Republican stimulus would undoubtedly have had more tax cuts and less spending, even though every serious study has shown that tax cuts are the least effective method of economic stimulus in a recession. Even so, tax cuts made up 35 percent of the budgetary cost of the stimulus bill—$291 billion—despite an estimate from Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers that tax cuts barely raised the gross domestic product $1 for every $1 of tax cut. By contrast, $1 of government purchases raised GDP $1.55 for every $1 spent. Obama also extended the Bush tax cuts for two years in 2010.

It’s worth remembering as well that Bush did not exactly bequeath Obama a good fiscal hand. Fiscal year 2009 began on October 1, 2008, and one third of it was baked in the cake the day Obama took the oath of office. On January 7, 2009, the Congressional Budget Office projected significant deficits without considering any Obama initiatives. It estimated a deficit of $1.186 trillion for 2009 with no change in policy. The Office of Management and Budget estimated in November of that year that Bush-era policies, such as Medicare Part D, were responsible for more than half of projected deficits over the next decade.

Republicans give no credit to Obama for the significant deficit reduction that has occurred on his watch—just as they ignore the fact that Bush inherited an projected budget surplus of $5.6 trillion over the following decade, which he turned into an actual deficit of $6.1 trillion, according to a CBO study—but the improvement is real.

Screenshot 2014-10-20 12.59.16

Republicans would have us believe that their tight-fisted approach to spending is what brought down the deficit. But in fact, Obama has been very conservative, fiscally, since day one, to the consternation of his own party. According to reporting by the Washington Post and New York Times, Obama actually endorsed much deeper cuts in spending and the deficit than did the Republicans during the 2011 budget negotiations, but Republicans walked away.

Obama’s economic conservatism extends to monetary policy as well. His Federal Reserve appointments have all been moderate to conservative, well within the economic mainstream. He even reappointed Republican Ben Bernanke as chairman in 2009. Many liberals have faulted Obama for not appointing board members willing to be more aggressive in using monetary policy to stimulate the economy and reduce unemployment.

Obama’s other economic appointments, such as Larry Summers at the National Economic Council and Tim Geithner at Treasury, were also moderate to conservative. Summers served on the Council of Economic Advisers staff in Reagan’s White House. Geithner joined the Treasury during the Reagan administration and served throughout the George H.W. Bush administration.

Health Reform

Contrary to rants that Obama’s 2010 health reform, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), is the most socialistic legislation in American history, the reality is that it is virtually textbook Republican health policy, with a pedigree from the Heritage Foundation and Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, among others.

It’s important to remember that historically the left-Democratic approach to healthcare reform was always based on a fully government-run system such as Medicare or Medicaid. During debate on health reform in 2009, this approach was called “single payer,” with the government being the single payer. One benefit of this approach is cost control: the government could use its monopsony buying power to force down prices just as Walmart does with its suppliers.

Conservatives wanted to avoid too much government control and were adamantly opposed to single-payer. But they recognized that certain problems required more than a pure free-market solution. One problem in particular is covering people with pre-existing conditions, one of the most popular provisions in ACA. The difficulty is that people may wait until they get sick before buying insurance and then expect full coverage for their conditions. Obviously, this free-rider problem would bankrupt the health-insurance system unless there was a fix.

The conservative solution was the individual mandate—forcing people to buy private health insurance, with subsidies for the poor. This approach was first put forward by Heritage Foundation economist Stuart Butler in a 1989 paper, “A Framework for Reform,” published in a Heritage Foundation book, A National Health System for America. In it, Butler said the number one element of a conservative health system was this: “Every resident of the U.S. must, by law, be enrolled in an adequate health care plan to cover major health costs.” He went on to say:

Under this arrangement, all households would be required to protect themselves from major medical costs by purchasing health insurance or enrolling in a prepaid health plan. The degree of financial protection can be debated, but the principle of mandatory family protection is central to a universal health care system in America.

In 1991, prominent conservative health economist Mark V. Pauley also endorsed the individual mandate as central to healthcare reform. In an article in the journal Health Affairs, Pauley said:

All citizens should be required to obtain a basic level of health insurance. Not having health insurance imposes a risk of delaying medical care; it also may impose costs on others, because we as a society provide care to the uninsured. … Permitting individuals to remain uninsured results in inefficient use of medical care, inequity in the incidence of costs of uncompensated care, and tax-related distortions.

In 2004, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) endorsed an individual mandate in a speech to the National Press Club. “I believe higher-income Americans today do have a societal and personal responsibility to cover in some way themselves and their children,” he said. Even libertarian Ron Bailey, writing in Reason, conceded the necessity of a mandate in a November 2004 article titled, “Mandatory Health Insurance Now!” Said Bailey: “Why shouldn’t we require people who now get health care at the expense of the rest of us pay for their coverage themselves? … Mandatory health insurance would not be unlike the laws that require drivers to purchase auto insurance or pay into state-run risk pools.”

Among those enamored with the emerging conservative health reform based on an individual mandate was Mitt Romney, who was elected governor of Massachusetts in 2002. In 2004, he put forward a state health reform plan to which he later added an individual mandate. As Romney explained in June 2005, “No more ‘free riding,’ if you will, where an individual says: ‘I’m not going to pay, even though I can afford it. I’m not going to get insurance, even though I can afford it. I’m instead going to just show up and make the taxpayers pay for me’.”

The following month, Romney emphasized his point: “We can’t have as a nation 40 million people—or, in my state, half a million—saying, ‘I don’t have insurance, and if I get sick, I want someone else to pay’.”

In 2006, Governor Romney signed the Massachusetts health reform into law, including the individual mandate. Defending his legislation in a Wall Street Journal article, he said:

I proposed that everyone must either purchase a product of their choice or demonstrate that they can pay for their own health care. It’s a personal responsibility principle.

Some of my libertarian friends balk at what looks like an individual mandate. But remember, someone has to pay for the health care that must, by law, be provided: Either the individual pays or the taxpayers pay. A free ride on government is not libertarian.

As late as 2008, Robert Moffitt of the Heritage Foundation was still defending the individual mandate as reasonable, non-ideological and nonpartisan in an article for the Harvard Health Policy Review. thisarticleappeared-novdec14

So what changed just a year later, when Obama put forward a health-reform plan that was almost a carbon copy of those previously endorsed by the Heritage Foundation, Mitt Romney, and other Republicans? The only thing is that it was now supported by a Democratic president that Republicans vowed to fight on every single issue, according to Robert Draper’s book Do Not Ask What Good We Do.

Senior Obama adviser David Axelrod later admitted that Romney’s Massachusetts plan was the “template” for Obama’s plan. “That work inspired our own health plan,” he said in 2011. But no one in the White House said so back in 2009. I once asked a senior Obama aide why. His answer was that once Republicans refused to negotiate on health reform and Obama had to win only with Democratic votes, it would have been counterproductive, politically, to point out the Obama plan’s Republican roots.

The left wing of the House Democratic caucus was dubious enough about Obama’s plan as it was, preferring a single-payer plan. Thus it was necessary for Obama to portray his plan as more liberal than it really was to get the Democratic votes needed for passage, which of course played right into the Republicans’ hands. But the reality is that ACA remains a very modest reform based on Republican and conservative ideas.

Other Rightward Policies

Below are a few other issues on which Obama has consistently tilted rightward:

Drugs: Although it has become blindingly obvious that throwing people in jail for marijuana use is insane policy and a number of states have moved to decriminalize its use, Obama continued the harsh anti-drug policy of previous administrations, and his Department of Justice continues to treat marijuana as a dangerous drug. As Time put it in 2012: “The Obama Administration is cracking down on medical marijuana dispensaries and growers just as harshly as the Administration of George W. Bush did.”

National-security leaks: At least since Nixon, a hallmark of Republican administrations has been an obsession with leaks of unauthorized information, and pushing the envelope on government snooping. By all accounts, Obama’s penchant for secrecy and withholding information from the press is on a par with the worst Republican offenders. Journalist Dan Froomkin charges that Obama has essentially institutionalized George W. Bush’s policies. Nixon operative Roger Stone thinks Obama has actually gone beyond what his old boss tried to do.

Race: I think almost everyone, including me, thought the election of our first black president would lead to new efforts to improve the dismal economic condition of African-Americans. In fact, Obama has seldom touched on the issue of race, and when he has he has emphasized the conservative themes of responsibility and self-help. Even when Republicans have suppressed minority voting, in a grotesque campaign to fight nonexistent voter fraud, Obama has said and done nothing.

Gay marriage: Simply stating public support for gay marriage would seem to have been a no-brainer for Obama, but it took him two long years to speak out on the subject and only after being pressured to do so.

Corporate profits: Despite Republican harping about Obama being anti-business, corporate profits and the stock market have risen to record levels during his administration. Even those progressives who defend Obama against critics on the left concede that he has bent over backward to protect corporate profits. As Theda Skocpol and Lawrence Jacobs put it: “In practice, [Obama] helped Wall Street avert financial catastrophe and furthered measures to support businesses and cater to mainstream public opinion. …  He has always done so through specific policies that protect and further opportunities for businesses to make profits.”

I think Cornel West nailed it when he recently charged that Obama has never been a real progressive in the first place. “He posed as a progressive and turned out to be counterfeit,” West said. “We ended up with a Wall Street presidency, a drone presidency, a national security presidency.”

I don’t expect any conservatives to recognize the truth of Obama’s fundamental conservatism for at least a couple of decades—perhaps only after a real progressive presidency. In any case, today they are too invested in painting him as the devil incarnate in order to frighten grassroots Republicans into voting to keep Obama from confiscating all their guns, throwing them into FEMA re-education camps, and other nonsense that is believed by many Republicans. But just as they eventually came to appreciate Bill Clinton’s core conservatism, Republicans will someday see that Obama was no less conservative.

Bruce Bartlett is the author of The Benefit and the Burden: Tax Reform—Why We Need It and What It Will Take.

If there is one event you could change in your life what would you change.

A haunting or embarrassing scenario from the past or a stupid action in the past.

I might as well copy a text post i found on r/geopolitics

They're set to vote this year. China has been pushing hard for it. There's a review every 5 years. China was rejected in 2010. If they're rejected again they'll have to wait until 2020. China needs 70% of the vote. The US has 16.75%, Japan has 6.23%, Saudi Arabia has 2.8%, Canada has 2.56%. That still leaves a tiny bit of wiggle room if all these countries vote against China's inclusion. If all the other countries vote how they did in joining the AIIB, China should be in.
Currently, only the dollar, euro, pound, and yen are included. The main advantage to getting included in the IMF special drawing rights basket is that all central banks must hold the yuan at a certain percentage, to be decided. This helps internationalize the use of the currency, and would help the yuan market deepen tremendously.
Inclusion in the SDR basket is supposed to depend on 1) global exports, and 2) a deep financial market. China is #1 in the first, but lacking in the second. China is making many reforms this year to try to boost the second factor. They've allowed the yuan to freely appreciate, even amidst some pretty atrocious exports. They've also pledged to increase other financial reforms leading up to the vote.
Nevertheless, most see the decision as being a geopolitical one. Its a faceoff between the US, who does not want to see the dollar diminished, and China who wants a seat at the table. Many see this step as similar to China's fight to be included in the WTO in 2001, which saw China become much more deeply integrated with the world's economy, and its GDP increase by 10 times its size from 2001 to 2015. China's inclusion in the SDR basket could have a similarly dramatic effect.

Source:http://www.reddit.com/r/geopolitics/comments/3323fg/any_predictions_for_whether_chinas_yuan_will_be/
Drawing Rights: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_drawing_rights

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